Official name World 600 | ||
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Date May 28, 1978 (1978-May-28) Location Charlotte Motor Speedway, Concord, North Carolina Course Permanent racing facility
1.500 mi (2.414 km) Distance 400 laps, 600 mi (965 km) Weather Temperatures reaching up to 84.9 °F (29.4 °C); wind speeds up to 8 miles per hour (13 km/h) | ||
The 1978 World 600, the 19th running of the event, was a NASCAR Winston Cup Series racing event that was held on May 28, 1978, at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina.
Contents
By 1980, NASCAR had completely stopped tracking the year model of all the vehicles and most teams did not take stock cars to the track under their own power anymore.
Summary
Zsa Zsa Gabor served as the celebrity grand marshal; sharing time in the spotlight with NASCAR team owner Robert Yates and Buddy Parrott. There were 40 drivers on the starting grid. A live audience of 125,000 enthusiastic NASCAR fans would see a total of 43 changes in the first-place position along with 32 laps under a caution flag. The entire race from green flag to checkered flag lasted for four hours and twenty minutes.
During the first 100 laps of this 400-lap extravaganza, David Pearson, Darrell Waltrip, and Donnie Allison were fighting it out for the lead. The final laps would become a constant battle between Donnie Allison, Darrell Waltrip, and Benny Parsons for the first-place finish. Waltrip would eventually defeat Donnie Allison by a time of two seconds on a stopwatch in his 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo vehicle. Joining him on victory lane would be his wife Stevie. As a couple, they embraced each other to the admiring fans; who were unaware that Darrell Waltrip would become a championship performer during the 1980s. Jerry Jolly would acquire the last-place finish in the race due to problems with his suspension on lap 20. The lowest driver to actually finish the race was D.K. Ulrich.
After the race, Cale Yarborough would only be 30 points behind Benny Parsons in the overall championship standings. The number of points for Dale Earnhardt and Ron Hutcherson were never recorded into the NASCAR data banks for future storage. The entire prize purse for this race was $310,491 ($1,140,103.94 when adjusted for inflation); Waltrip received a then-incredible amount of $48,608 to take home to his family ($178,485.60 when adjusted for inflation) while Jerry Jolly had to take home a meager $1,090 ($4,002.41 when adjusted for inflation). Roland Wlodyka would end his professional driving career with the NASCAR Cup Series after the end of this racing event.
Racial controversy
Willy T. Ribbs was expected to be at this NASCAR Cup Series event, being a popular African-American race car driver of the time. After failing to appear at two special practice sessions, he was sacked and replaced with then-obscure driver Dale Earnhardt; who back then specialized in short track racing and was not yet a serious championship contender. A lot of traditionalists chided the opportunities that Ribbs received; getting into the higher levels of NASCAR simply because he was black.
Finishing order
* Driver failed to finish race